Local news, tools to carry in car

[Stormin Mormon]

Don't you use the gun to get another car?

[Pete C.]

I keep a small (Craftsman) tool kit in the truck along with a collection of easily field replaceable items such as lamps, fuses, belts and a turbo/intercooler hose and clamp set. It would be really silly to be stranded and calling for assistance for something I can replace in 5.5 minutes on the side of the road. I also make sure I know key procedures like bleeding the low and high pressure sides of the fuel system. I have heard of people stuck for a day or more when 5 minutes with a wrench will fix the problem, and indeed in one case I gave the person the bleeding procedure and they reported back they were up and running in minutes after that.

[Stormin Mormon]

Very nicely done. Bet they were thankful. If not, they ought have been.

[Robert Green]

I was lucky enough to have gone into journalism right after Woodward and Bernstein were doing their Watergate series. For a while, journos were getting more respect than they used to. I don't recall ever being coerced but I do recall more than one person trying to bribe me to either not write a story or to color it their way. I have been screwed around with pretty seriously, but I am sure I would call it coercion. Misdirection was common. If someone thought you were getting close to something they wanted to remain hidden they could really send you off in a totally wrong direction. Another reason I probably wasn't coerced was that during those years I carried a Beretta .380 in a shoulder holster. (-:

Reporters in the US have it easy. I recall recently seeing the figures relating to the number of foreign journalists who are killed on the job and it's been going up every year, largely because of the many uprisings occurring in the Arab world.

When I started working for the now defunct Washington Star I was issued a Metro PC police pass which was pretty much like being given a magical key to the city. Cops knew enough to treat press pass holders with less contempt than ordinary citizens and back then, I wrote enough "police friendly" articles that I wasn't on their radar in a bad way.

I used to go on several "ride alongs" a month and that really helped me realize what a thankless job cops have. I can still remember walking with a cop buddy on the streets of DC when some crazy old woman ran up to him and spit a huge loogie on his uniform just because he was a cop. The uniform seems to bring out the worst in certain types of authority-hating lunatics.

That's all changed post 911 from what my few remaining (working) journo friends. Pass or not, you're just trash nowadays as the two incidents you described indicate.

Raw news always interests me. Remember the claims that they had found a drain pipe in OJ's house filled with Nicole's blood? The rumors fly so fast and furious in breaking news that it's nearly an impossible job to get the facts fully checked before press time. The worst thing that could ever happen to many of the different editors I worked for was to be "scooped" by a rival paper.

That pressure unfortunately drives a lot of shoddy reporting and leads to a fair number of retractions. The most recent example I can think of was the reporting about the possible deaths from the recent super-typhoon. I read reports that as many as 20,00 people died which was way over the top. Then, of course, you have reporters like Jason Blair who just make up the news

[Robert Green]

Ironically we've found the serious flaw in your argument. There are well over 1,000 newspapers published daily in the US. Your sample size of 2 is a tad small to make universal generalizations. I read at least 20 different papers online each day (when I can) via Google News and I still wouldn't assert any universal truth about newspapers based on even that small sample.

That pre-supposes a strong bias on the part of reporters that I don't think exists. I would contend that to get the real news, you have to read at least three different articles by different reporters about the same event. The problem is really one of reporters not being subject matter experts in whatever they are reporting on. They are generalists by nature, usually covering a number of different "beats." While I am not denying that reporters like all people have personal biases, I believe what you're trying to describe is simply the problem of a subject matter expert always being able to trump someone like a reporter who isn't and can't be by the very nature of the job.

That gets back to my contention that if you want to discover the truth, read at least three different articles on that subject. Op-Ed pieces, IMHO, are notorious for leaving out information that could damage the point they are trying to make. For instance, the Atlantic article I cited about the NFL screwing taxpayers never mentioned a word about what kind of economic benefits a Superbowl game brings to the hosting city. It's the Achilles' heel of OpEd writing - making as strong a case as you can for your POV and discounting (or as you put it, "hiding") facts that run counter to that case.

That's what my wife says, too. (-: Not sure if that's good or bad.

I won't dispute that. My only axe to grind here is that not *every* reporter is like that although far too many are. Things haven't improved lately because of the terrible economic state of newspapers, largely because of internet competition.

Some news organizations haven't fired ALL their fact-checkers because of the ever-present threat of lawsuits. They certainly have fired most of their proof-readers and copy-editors, though. At one time I thought writing for the Washington Post was the ultimate job for a reporter. These days, it's a fish wrapping, birdcage lining pile of junk. I hope Jeff Bezos can turn it around. All the good reporters took buyouts a long, long time ago and the remaining staffers can't write worth a damn.

For what it's worth, here are some of the papers I try to read daily courtesy of Google News:

The Washington Post The Baltimore Sun The LA Times The Chicago Trib The NY Times Businessweek Bloomberg The Wall St. Journal The Guardian The Miami Herald Reuters USA Today The NY Daily News The Seattle Post Intelligencer The San Francisco Chronicle The Detroit Free Press The Times of India Pravda The Houston Chronical

and scads of sites like Fox, NatGeo, Discovery, Computerworld, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, almost all through Google News. Google uses automatic algorithms to determine which stories are generating the most interest so no fallible human editors are involved. For example, the subject "train derailment" will have a link that says "See all 5,432 articles?"

One thing that becomes very (sadly) obvious after reading a while is that there's not a whole lot of original reporting happening. Many of those

5,000+ articles have large sections are obviously "borrowed" word-for-word from some place else. Many are word for word reprints.

[RobertMacy]

What did you do after stopping with the journalism?